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OVERVIEW

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Brief Synopsis

A movie star runs off to the mountains for an incognito vacation.

While staying at the Hotel San Francisco, Emory Muir encounters a strange woman in a heavy veil, who faints when she is surrounded by a mob of people gathering around a car accident. After Emory whisks her away in a taxi, the woman, Miss Colfax, asks to return to the hotel, where she finally reveals her bucktoothed face to her benefactor. Later, Miss Colfax, who is in reality Carol Corliss, a beautiful movie star suffering from agoraphobia brought on by a confrontation with over-zealous fans, overhears Emory and his uncle, Judge Thaddeus Parks, discussing the Parks's mountain retreat. In disguise as the homely Miss Colfax, Carol begs Emory to take her with him to the retreat, and he reluctantly drives her there. To protect her reputation, Emory gives Carol the big, untidy cabin, then goes off to sleep in a nearby shack. While bird watching the next morning, Emory spies an undisguised Carol swimming in the lake and follows her wet footprints back to the cabin. Confused and curious, Emory telephones Carol's psychiatrist in San Francisco and demands to know her identity. Although the doctor refuses to name Carol, Emory stumbles on a photograph of the star while he is in town. By the time Emory returns to her cabin, the lazy, tempermental Carol has decided to reveal herself to him and is shocked when he refuses to believe that she is a movie star. In spite of her efforts to convince him, Emory maintains his ruse as a skeptic and bullies her into cleaning up the cabin and cooking his meals. Eventually Jay Holmes, Carol's egotistical co-star, tracks her to the cabin and demands that she return to the city with him. Carol, who is now in love with Emory, threatens Jay with a gun just as Sheriff Twing arrives. After the disapproving sheriff disarms Carol, Emory shows up and, telling Jay that he is Carol's psychiatrist, finagles him into staging a phony fight as part of her "treatment." Desperate to prove her identity, Carol then takes Emory to the village movie theater, where her latest picture is being screened. After she "convinces" Emory that she really is Carol Corliss, she announces herself to the audience. In spite of the mob that forms, Carol remains calm and embraces her fans. Although cured of her agoraphobia, Carol fights with Emory over Jay and her career, and the couple separates. The next morning, a weeping Carol connives with Minna, Twing's granddaughter, to have the sheriff force Emory into marrying her on moral grounds. The sheriff, however, confuses Jay with Emory and, at gunpoint, makes the actor sign the marriage license instead of Emory. Before Jay and Carol are pronounced man and wife, Minna rushes in with Emory, who agrees to wed Carol on condition that the marriage be annuled once they have returned to the city. Eventually Carol, who has resumed her movie career, reconciles with Emory, but also learns through Jay that she is not legally married to him.